She talks to her at her lowest moments, at her wildest highs; when she can't even whisper, when she can do nothing but cry. She says furious things, contradictory things, nonsense and nostalgic chides. She tells Azula finger-combing only makes hair greasier; she explains pain is as vital as breath, that fire is the greatest lie, that illusions should be heeded because they're the solidest life ever gets. She laments missed opportunities for admissions of unconditional love and irrepressible revulsion and unrelenting fears that all came true, of course, and Azula just look at your fingernails.
She shuts up when Azula starts laughing. Sometimes Azula laughs for days, maybe, except when there's water; the water that tries to smother her fire or maybe choke out her crazy, but it's useless because the fire isn't there anymore and she is already choking.
The water is always gone once she starts being able to hear her lungs, but by then laughter is also impossible and through the sloshes in her chest and the gurgles in her throat, that voice comes back.
"How beautiful you are," it says. "My beautiful, twisted little girl."
Mother always did like to state the obvious, except when she lied. And what a lackluster liar she was.
But her brother laughs and tells Ursa how happy he is that she's back, how good she is looking, how much Azula won't admit that she missed her as well.
"She's dead, dumb-dumb," Azula tells Zuko while her mother smiles indulgently in the corner. "You're dead," she tells Ursa without looking to see the pity in her frown.
They don't listen to her. They don't care that she's right.
But self-righteousness never suited her very well; Zuzu had always worn it much better.
"Fine, then," she growls, allowing them to bask in her tolerant scorn for the moment. "Pretend to mix my precious air with the stench of your imaginary breath if you must. I'm sure the spirit world offers no better entertainment."
"None as amusing as this," her mother says, and for a moment Azula forgets the leather squeezing the least useless of her joints and the emptiness in her chest and pictures punches and kicks and surges of fire even the dead will feel.
And just like every other time she does something particularly noisy, the water soon returns.
xxx
Coherency and the water don't coincide for her often.
She's not supposed to die. They've not told her why, but just that is enough. She's not supposed to die, and so she can't. She can't die, and so she breathes. But even as she roars, her fire is silent. Even as she calls, her fire turns deaf.
Sometimes she refuses to blink, and her dry eyes sting as if the air is burning, and shadows dance in her retinas as if heat is turning the light fickle. And yet nothing is blue but her rage and nothing burns but her impotence.
Many of her movements are unfamiliar without flame. Her hands especially seem foreign. She's pressed a fist to the underside of her jaw many times, a gesture she'd never imagined making; and even if she had, she'd never imagine failing. But she does, of course; every time.
Without breath, there can't be fire; without fire, there shouldn't be breath. Isn't that so?
They don't understand this, the scum crawling over everything in matching white robes carrying soap and meals and needles. They've probably never breathed properly in their life.
Peasants, worthless, dirty, all around – she would roast them all, boil them in their own blood and fry them in their own fat and evaporate the marrow from their bones and pop their eyeballs like corn and then suck it all in with a breath, yes, but –
She breathes in dead air and breathes it out deader. The ugly, useless ones in uniforms pull on buckles and laces and her farthest ends go white, more and more of her becoming cold and still. She once used those fingers to turn houses into ash. She used to sharpen those nails into arrows, pointing, painting everything in their path red and blue and black.
A handsome one looks down at her and laughs. He has the brown eyes of dirt and a beautiful nose, and his laughter is harsh and purposely so. He hears her wheezes and the grating of her teeth, he sees the moisture stuck in her eyelids, can probably smell on her anger and fear and baser things. She has better teeth than him, even now, although she doubts she has enough throat or enough scorn left to laugh like he does.
Just for this, he would be blinded and flogged. Just for this, she would make sure he never gets another job in the Fire Nation in his lifetime. Except –
Water slams into her, crawling into every crevice it can find, smothering her outrage before it can be voiced. She wills her nostrils not to flare and her limbs not to flail; but she inhales water anyway and the restraints still dig into her skin.
She counts (one, two, three and all the way to twenty) and when she's finally up she tries to make every cough count, because she still needs the time to breathe and despite her death being forbidden it's still –
Down, down, down again and Azula knows she's never been so terrified of anything as she is of this; not even of Azulon, not even of Ozai. She gasps and more water gets in than bubbles come out.
It's around the sixth dunk that Azula realizes she'd never be able to kill herself by suffocation.
xxx
Her father doesn't visit often (her father doesn't visit ever), but when he does, he reclines on her wooden stool with no armrests and sips her cold tea warm and looks like he had all of this predesigned. Sometimes he speaks. Usually he smirks.
She used to try to tell him, "You're not real." Used to try to explain that just like her, he doesn't have his fire anymore and not his freedom either; that just like her, he's chained somewhere, rotting and brewing his shame and fury slowly into fermentation.
He never listens (none of them do), and so she stopped. She doubts her voice is any more relevant than any of theirs, anymore, and anyway there really isn't a point in correcting the perceptual errors of her own hallucinations.
He laughs. "You've always been a self-centered little brat," he says. Now his tea smells of volatility. "I'd like to know what it is that makes you think this is at all about you."
He would like to know. She'd never tell him, then.
"Petulant," he remarks. "It runs in the family, I suppose. Such glorious children I have reared."
"Why are you here?" Even though he appears to have no problem responding to the least articulate of her thoughts, she thinks it is a good time to use her voice. He seems to disagree.
He leans back on the backless seat, but the wall is conveniently behind him. "Well, you are right," he says. "I am here for you." He smiles, lips shaping softly upwards. "I think you miss my hands."
She screams and screams and tears her wrists on the blunt edges of her restraints, and by the time the water's back the stench of alcohol is gone.
xxx
Ty Lee looks at many things except her and talks in a voice that doesn't expect to be taken seriously. She tells Azula about the hardest creases to get makeup out of and the muscles that hurt best and the boys with the firmest butts and the girls with tongues almost as sharp as her own; she even giggles.
"You might be real," Azula concedes, and the smile drops from Ty Lee's face in two distinct, broken stages that make her round cheeks and round lips and round eyes look even more pathetic.
The silence feels natural to Azula, but Ty Lee was never comfortable with stillness. She squirms, and her eyes shoot every which way. Azula tries to follow their trajectory – the peeling paint of the ceiling, the chip in the side table, the tiny procession of caterpillar-ants on the edge of the wall. Finally they come to rest just a few inches from the end of Azula's big toe, and Ty Lee sniffs and fidgets with the visitor pass in her hands.
"Take care of yourself, 'Zula," she says, with a voice that's perky and the opposite of everything on her face. She might even brave a glance at her before leaving, but Azula has stopped waiting for it and her eyes are already closed.
Ty Lee's footsteps are silent and any doors that need closing behind her are very far away. There's no wind and not many things that would rustle.
Azula spends a few tenuous strings of time replaying all the giggles she can remember over and over and over in her head.
xxx
"Azula, I want to talk to you about your sanity."
She finds her mother sitting cross-legged on her bed, hands in her lap and shoulders hunched, as if she never was a Lady of the Fire Nation, or really a royal of any kind.
"What are you doing," Azula barks at her. "Watch your posture," she orders. Her mother slumps down further. "This is disgraceful."
"There's something very wrong with your head, Azula," Ursa tells her calmly. "If you ask me, there always has been."
Azula laughs, short and harsh. "Well," she says, "I didn't."
Ursa leans back on her elbows and tangles her feet in the bedspread. "Azula, please, of course you did," she says. "I wouldn't be here otherwise."
Azula glares at her, fighting the urge to straighten out the crumpled sheets. "Oh, shut up," she says.
"I think you know this too, Azula."
"This is pure drivel. I shouldn't have to listen to this."
"Azula, it's been going on for quite a while."
"Will you stop saying my name?" Azula snaps. "Is it really necessary to tack my name onto every single sentence? I'm not deaf; I can recognize condescension when I hear it without being constantly reminded –"
"Reminded of what, Azula?"
"Shut up! Just shut up. I didn't ask for you, I don't want you, I don't care about you, I really wish you'd just leave!"
Ursa stands up, and suddenly she's tall and graceful and mature and so, so much more of a Fire Lady than Azula could ever be. She takes a few insubstantial steps, the way only a memory or a spirit can, and then Azula is enveloped in warm arms smelling of fire lilies, and a cheek is pressed against the crown of her head, and she never, never even loved her mother at all, and Azula doesn't ever hug –
Except she is, and she does.
Ursa murmurs her name and other pointless things into Azula's hair, and Azula leans her forehead against Ursa's collarbone and breathes in familiar, forgotten scents.
And she has already managed to fist her hands in her mother's dress like a clingy, pitiful child (like Zuko) before Ursa unwraps herself from around her and steps back.
And then she says, "Okay," and is gone.
Azula doesn't see her mother for a long time after that.
xxx
Zuko comes to see her not long after a routine session with the lockable bathtub. Her hair is still wet.
"Zuzu, I was always better than you at everything." She slurs. She's given up on mortification. "It honestly wasn't all that hard." She pauses. "I didn't make a plan for this."
"No, you didn't," he agrees, redundant as ever. "Neither did I."
"I should have. I had many plans, you know. I wasn't supposed to be the useless one."
"Well," he starts, stops, continues, "you kind of are."
She laughs, but not very well. "I can recite over three hundred classic poems. I can name war generals in twenty-six regions from fifteen decades back. I'll tell you all about the history of the first Fire National ironware factory while going through the seven dragon forms."
"Don't you see?" His familiar, lispy voice rises. Incredulity, perhaps, or irritation. The beard looks silly on him. "None of that matters. It never really did."
That's wrong. Erroneous. Unsubstantiated. "No," she says, and builds no solid counterargument. All her chains have crumbled some time ago.
He looks at her, and there's gold in his eyes, metallic, solid. But there are other things, softer, ugly things. She hates him for them. "All right," he allows. The bastard.
"I can also beat you at Pai Sho." She wasn't always so petty. She'd since ceased lighting pretty wooden dolls up in flames.
"I've been practicing," he says, with a bit of a smile in his voice. "I can bring a board next time, put your bragging to the test."
"You'll visit again?" she says before she can not. Her voice is an octave higher than it should be, and she wishes for a knife to apply to her vocal chords (she's stopped wishing for fire).
Still with a half-smile on his face, Zuko nods and also says, "Yes."
He tells her about reinstated international trade routes, about shared-waters fishing policies and new transportation methods fueled by fire- and waterbended steam and designed by an Earth Kingdom genius. He also tells her about unemployed ex-soldiers and dwindling war coffers that don't allow for very comfortable pensions, about disgruntled nobles and difficulties raising taxes on luxury merchandise and idle assets.
He asks for her advice.
"I'm insane, you know," she tells him, and he nods.
"It's kind of hard to miss," he says.
So she shows him the economic models she's been developing on pieces of toilet paper. She tells him about her ideas for an income-dependent tax system with increasing percentages proportional to pre-existing wealth. He asks her for tips on ass-kissing and she tells him fear always worked for her much better than flattery, and left significantly less of a foul aftertaste.
They don't talk about Ursa; not the living one, and not the real one either. But they do talk about Mai; or rather, Zuko talks about Mai and Azula pretends not to listen. When the subject of their father is broached, Zuko calls him Ozai and Azula calls him nothing.
And when Zuko leaves, she believes he'll be back, and maybe not in a crazy way.
xxx
A woman in white steps into Azula's homey little cell.
She's new.
"Hello," she says, coolly, politely. "Room two-oh-six: Princess Azula."
Azula had been looking at her ceiling, the only surface not covered by something squishy; she knows its every groove, water spot and scorpion-spider web by heart. Now she looks at her guest. "Former princess, imbecile," she courteously corrects her.
The woman nods distractedly and rummages through her white canvas bag. "I'm Dr. Jiing." She pulls out three small glass bottles and syringes. "I'm here to give you your medicine."
Well, this is a chatty one. They don't usually talk; simply tightening the restraints and sticking a needle in her generally gets their point across just fine.
"I've managed to deduce that much, somehow," Azula replies and watches Dr. Jiing fill a syringe with a slightly opaque solution.
She taps it gently. "Extend your arm for me, please," she instructs. "This is an experimental blend intended to prevent violent episodes. I'm told you've been receiving a medium dose at least twice a week." She probes the inside of Azula's elbow for a suitably prominent vein and swipes it with alcohol. "That's quite a lot, actually. You don't seem uncontrollable enough to warrant it." She inserts the needle. "I might have a word with your chief overseer. What do you think?"
Azula stares at her and says nothing.
Chatty, indeed.
Dr. Jiing fills the second syringe with a clear liquid. "This is a mild sedative. It'll help calm you down," she says as she pushes the plunger. "You should be receiving it in pills, but I suppose nobody trusts you very much around here, huh?"
The third syringe is filled with a bluish liquid that seems to be faintly glowing. "A bending suppressant," Dr. Jiing explains. "Only used in cases of extreme –"
Azula yelps and grabs Dr. Jiing's arm. "Bending suppressant?" she repeats, frantically. "I've been, all this time – I mean, I can – I can still bend?"
"Not at the moment," says Dr. Jiing as she gently removes Azula's hand from her wrist. "Which is entirely the point."
Azula leans back and blinks in a daze. Her fire isn't gone. It's still somewhere inside her; dormant, unreachable, but there.
"No one told you this?" she vaguely hears the doctor ask in the background.
"No," she breathes.
She still feels numb as she allows Dr. Jiing to inject her with the last drug and tape a piece of cotton on the puncture marks. She hardly notices anything Dr. Jiing says, and doesn't notice at all that she's bid the doctor a quiet Thank you until Dr. Jiing tells her she's welcome.
The next morning and for many days after that, the only ones she sees are the silent men in white; but they don't inject her with the opaque solution as often, and they start giving her small white pills instead of the clear liquid.
And for the first time since finding herself in this place, it occurs to Azula that she doesn't know any of their names.
xxx
Her mother melts out of a wall and Azula wonders if she was cleaning it from the inside, even though that isn't something Ursa would do at all.
"I would think there'd be countless things I would rather be doing than spying on my relatives, if I were a spirit," Azula tells her.
Ursa smiles softly; Azula is so sick of soft smiles. "Is that so?" she asks, and Azula doesn't care whether she's referring to the thing she just said or the thing she just thought.
"Yes," she replies. "Checking to see what happens when I jam a chopstick in my cerebral cortex through my nasal cavity being among the highlights. Do you suppose it might impede my artistic proclivities?"
Ursa chuckles and says nothing.
"So," says Azula, "have you taken permanent residence inside my walls or were you just passing through?"
Her mother looks at her and is silent.
"What? What would you like to lecture me about today? I've been chewing my nails every dinner like a good little girl and I promise I told no one about the roach-rat under my bed, although I doubt they would bother killing it anyway."
Her mother sits down and makes herself comfortable.
"Is this about the hit list under my pillow? You don't have to worry; I've already tried checking off about half of it. No luck so far."
"Azula," says Ursa, and for a moment Azula remembers why she used to have some respect for the dead (and for mothers).
Azula sighs. She is tired. "Are you looking for sincere penitence? A formal apology for my wicked ways? An anguished confession of my many sins?"
Ursa regards her with sad eyes, softness still written all across her features.
"No," she says simply. "I've just missed hearing you talk."
xxx
Mai visits exactly once.
"I hope you know I recommended you for the new maximum security underground prison," she tells Azula. "I made a formal Request of Transfer and everything. It was quite a hassle."
"I appreciate the effort," Azula replies, and wishes her voice weren't quite so scratchy. Hoarseness is not a very effective conductor for malice. "I've heard they serve some excellent canyon crawler meatloaf down there."
Mai's expression doesn't change, but Azula knows that if she were anyone else she'd be rolling her eyes.
"Yes, well, trust dear Zuko to find you a cushy little place like this to rot away in." She glances at the metal-laced leather creeping around Azula's wrists and spine and ankles; at the mold leeching moisture from the corners of the ceiling; at the half-empty rice bowl now feeding Azula's roach-rat by the foot of the bed. Or maybe she only pauses for dramatic effect; it really is hard to tell with Mai. "On second thought, I can't say I completely disapprove."
Azula smiles and rearranges her limbs into a more comfortable position. "So, Mai, how's being married to my idiot brother going for you?"
"It's not as dull as not being married to him," Mai says mildly. "And you may address me as Your Royal Highness."
"Of course, Fire Lady Mai, Your Royal Highness." Her smile sharpens. "So you have yet to bear our Lord Zuko an heir, I hear. No luck? Or have you been avoiding sharing his bedroom? I wouldn't blame you."
"Azula, your taunts have not improved at all," Mai says. "What have you been doing with all this spare time?"
"What? That was a perfectly crushing insult to my brother's virility; a valid and demoralizing barb."
Mai yawns. "If you say so."
Azula scowls. "Fine, then. You can be the one to carry the conversation."
Predictably, they sit and stare at each other in perfect silence for several minutes.
Eventually Mai speaks up. "As charming as this little reunion was," she says, "I actually do have better things to do than gawp at what's left of your smug face. If you die, don't bother including me in your will; I think I've smelled enough moldy bed sheets today to last me a lifetime."
Azula tries to discreetly sniff her sheets, and Mai stands up and walks away.
"Wait," Azula calls after her. Mai doesn't turn, but she stops. "I'm sorry for almost killing you, Mai. It was a foolish decision, and I would have regretted it."
Azula is insane, but she doesn't think even her psychosis could conjure up the sound of Mai's laughter.
"Don't flatter yourself," says Mai. "If it weren't for Ty Lee you'd have had six stilettos in your throat before finishing the sentence."
There are many things that can cause Mai to leave with a scoff. They are, however, a very select few, those that can make her crack a smile.
Azula can't say she doesn't feel at least a little bit smug.
xxx
The people in white are giving her many looks from under eyebrows. Their visits are punctuated by constant scratches of quills on pads, satisfied nods at no one in particular, cold fingers pressing into her wrists to measure heart rate.
Gradually Azula notices more and more official-looking documents exchange hands around her; on one of them she spots Zuzu's embellished, infantile signature. The whitecoats don't approach her with needles as often, and it takes Azula a little while to realize she hasn't nearly-drowned in a very long time. She hasn't seen her mother, either.
"Don't get too excited," the handsome one tells her as he accidentally spills her pudding all over her cloth shoes. He puts the vegetable broth down just fine. "Even if you get out of here, that just means you're sane enough to stand proper trial. You're not going to be looking at a prison from the outside for very long."
"Well." Azula scoops a spoonful of pudding from her left shoe and promptly consumes it. Mmm, tapioca. "Neither are you."
He overturns the salad bowl on top of her head. Azula decides she doesn't despise him entirely, even if she would immensely enjoy watching him writhe in agony at her feet.
When the day finally arrives that doors open before her instead of slam behind and she is able to raise her arms above shoulder level, Azula is altogether too intoxicated by the feeling of the sun on her bare skin to care about the new metal cuffs adorning her wrists or the four guards standing at attention two steps behind her.
She breathes in deeply through her nose, turns her right hand upwards, closes her eyes, and breathes out.
And despite the medication still swirling in her veins and the fact that she hasn't bended in more than a year; and even though it is small and not even blue and something a child could do without having to be taught – when she opens her eyes there's a small flame dancing in Azula's palm, hot and alive and faintly tingly, and she is happy in a way she hasn't been in a very long time, and maybe never really understood.
And quite frankly, she feels no great urge to look back on the outside of the lovely establishment that served as her home and prison for the last dozen months.